I hate to ruin anyone’s day as they settle down to read their local newspaper but I need to raise the unthinkable reality of how near we might be to another World War.

The possibility is intermittently raised by mainstream TV journalists reporting on Israel’s criminal and relentless campaign to, I believe, exterminate Palestinians living in Palestine and to eradicate Palestine as a geographical and political territory independent of the predatory, apartheid state of Israel.

The intra-journalist conversations on the airwaves are, almost without exception, superficial, pro-Israel and its ‘self-defence’ lie, and conducted as if they were reporting on a game of Monopoly to which the opportunity to buy weapons as well as houses and hotels, and kill people standing in the way of owning everything on the board.

Standard phrases and facial expressions, possibly learned in a module on a journalism course, are combined to indicate appropriate levels of seriousness and concern to the viewer that some part of the ‘axis of evil’ – a USA phrase for countries opposing USA Islamophobia and global military expansionism – will ‘overreact’ to Israel’s right to ‘self-defence’ and necessitate Israel attacking them as well.

Given what is happening in Palestine, the axis of evil would appear to have the patience of old Biblical Job.

We might, however, do well to remember that it took only a week for the political winds to change and the patience of Job in relation to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to become a declaration of immediate war in 1939.

My mother, who was 19 at the time, often told us how Neville Chamberlain announced on the radio on a Sunday morning: “This country is now at war with Germany.”

For six years before that, the cost of powerful governments doing nothing to stop Hitler was being paid, primarily, by the Jewish population of Germany, who constituted little more than 1 per cent of Germany’s population.

Once the war started, it would take seven years and 75,000,000 deaths (40,000,000 were civilians) before it ended.

The post-war romanticised version of heroic little ‘England’ taking on Hitler in 1939 to prevent the genocide of European Jews, or the USA riding in like John Wayne to the rescue of Jew and Gentile alike as Europe faltered in the war, is not the whole truth.

It is not the brave actions of Resistance fighters and soldiers, but the motives of the governments that need more honest and objective scrutiny if we are to understand the risks and likely triggers of World War III.

Could nothing have stopped Fascism taking control in Europe? What non-military, economic and political sanctions could those opposing the Fascist destruction of German Democracy have imposed much earlier than September, 1939?

The League of Nations was created immediately after the First World War to end war.

It had 41 nations as members. Its purpose was the prevention of another world war. It could not, because like the United Nations, created after World War II for the same reason, its authority was undermined and abused by the selfish interests of its most powerful members right from the start.

By 1922, the Italian self-defined Fascist, Benito Mussolini, had seized power in Italy.

It happened very quickly. He had articulated the political ideology and movement as Fascism as early as 1915.

The League of Nations tried to impose sanctions on Mussolini. Guess who opposed and totally ignored them? Britain and France!

Both countries secretly negotiated and cut their own deal with Fascist Italy, including supporting Italy’s later invasion of Ethopia (Abyssinia) in 1935.

Fascism had also raised its head in Spain.

In 1931, Spain became a democratic republic. The decision to secularise education angered the Catholic Church, and labour and peasant rights angered landowners and employers.

By 1933, the Fascists had gained a foot-hold of power in government.

The assassination of extreme-Right leader José Calvoanti in 1936 triggered an attempted coup by Fascists, and the Spanish Civil War.

God, the Catholic Church, and the rest of the great and good were on the side of Fascism in Spain.

Why? It sat closer to their own politics than the Socialism of the elected governments.

Some 5,000 people were killed in the war. The Fascists won. In the next 10 years, from 1939-1949, a further 200,000 died at the hands of the Fascist dictatorship in forced labour camps and concentration camps, by execution, or by starvation!

Europe hardly noticed. It was only fighting German Fascism.

The Fascists in Germany also gained power in 1933.

By 1935, Germany had legalised its treatment against its ‘lesser’ citizens and specifically against the Jewish population, having already revoked the right of Jews to be civil servants or join the army, and actively enabled ghettoisation and pogroms.

Four years to the month before the 1939 war started, the Fascist government passed two new laws – The Reich Citizenship Law, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour.

The first included a definition of ‘a Jew’ as anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents. It withdrew the right of German citizens meeting that definition to enjoy full citizen rights, including the right to vote.

‘Religious’ Jews needed only two grandparents to be disfranchised.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour made sexual relations and marriage between Jews and non-Jews unlawful. It also prohibited the employment of German women under the age of 45 in Jewish households, and vice versa.

Jewish businesses were banned from tendering for or receiving government contracts and Jewish children from attending state schools.

The first concentration camps were also being constructed.

Britain and France were, presumably too busy supporting Fascism in Italy and turning a blind eye in Spain to do much about it.

By September, 1939, Hitler had already invaded the Rhineland (1936), Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938, and by September, 1939, some 282,000 Jews had already been forced to flee Germany. Palestine accepted 60,000 of those Jewish refugees.

Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, and then started the war within a week.

Poland had a military alliance with both Britain and France and held them to it.

If Hitler had agreed not to cross the Polish border, they would have continued to stand idly by in 1939.

Then and now, the motivation of governments was not peace, not justice, not people – but territorial interest, assets and power.

One unforeseen upset ruins the gameplay and the people are told the next world war has already started.